Opinion Columnists

Rice: This is the life I have

Jeff Rice

Journal-Advocate columnist

Posted:
06/24/2013 10:43:33 AM MDT

I have been thinking some about my own death lately — having birthdays in your 60s can cause that — and I've been wondering whether I can come to grips with it, accept it as inevitable, whenever it comes. I think I've decided not to accept it at all.

This is harder to explain for someone of my, um ... philosophical stripe, if you will. You see, this probably is easier for people who believe there is a pleasant enough afterlife awaiting them, one that conforms to their particular needs, one in which their earthly vision of the spiritual world is validated and they know, finally, they were right and all of those Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings were not wasted.

I don't have that. I am an apostate. If God's calling me, my message box is full and I don't even have that phone any more. If he exists and he's emailing me, I sold my computer years ago. If he's ringing my doorbell ... well, you get the idea.

You may well believe that I am wandering in darkness, unenlightened and uncomforted by the love and forgiveness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I will reply that I move in the light of complete freedom, unshackled by an unfathomable, self-contradictory mythology of an ancient tribe of militant goat herders.

You say tomato, I say "No, thanks."

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So, knowing intellectually that my time on this earth could end before I finish this sentence, and in the well-informed knowledge that this is all there is, my friend, I have decided that each day must be lived the best way I know how. There will come a day, when my grandchildren are gone, that I am utterly forgotten, as if I never existed, just like every generation before me. I will not be memorialized as a great thinker or artist or general or statesman. I am not a man for the ages; I am a man of the here and now, and when it is no longer my here or my now, I will evaporate. Indeed, my physical remains will be reduced to a few pounds of ashes and returned, literally, to the earth so as to make me vanish utterly.

I will never have been.

And so, I live and do each day as if today is the full measure of my life. If I read Ulysses Grant's memoirs on camping trips this summer, then I must apply what I learn of his life to my teaching and working next fall. If I teach a class of college freshmen basic composition, I must show them how to find their voices. This is all I have. I have no idea how to be wealthy, and so I will work to enrich the lives of others.

True retirement, then, is not in my future. Like my father, I cannot, in good conscience, withdraw from the world to a life of isolation and leisure. I will have wisdom and experience and knowledge, and I owe it to the world to contribute, even if it is only to be ready, to offer, to wait to serve.

That doesn't mean I want to serve, mind you. I do want to withdraw, to putter, to rest and have no responsibility. But I don't have that right. So I will not sit and wait for death, or play and deny its existence. I will not even think about death.

RE-1 Valley School District has announced its policy for determining eligibility of children who may receive free and reduced price meals served under the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program.
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